Livedrive has been around for a very long time, and has undergone many changes over the years. It was surprising to see how much the quality of the product has improved since moving to the UK.

One good example of this positive evolution is that where previously separate applications had to be installed for each feature, now almost everything has been integrated into a single interface. The software is bursting with features, and offers plenty of control for advanced users to tweak every setting imaginable.

It’s not all good news however: first time visitors to the Livedrive website are likely to find it difficult to understand the products on offer. This is partly due to the pricing structure being very different to that found with our other best cloud storage and backup services.

As a new user, you’re expected to know which product you want to buy without being given the opportunity to test them all. There’s no clear information on whether you can freely swap between the different plans during your free trial. The short trial duration of only 14 days is one of the tightest we’ve seen here at Cloudwards.net.

There are also some weird clauses in the terms and conditions and privacy policy documents that could be a source of concern for some users.

With so many good things to like about what Livedrive is offering, it’s a pity more care wasn’t taken in creating user-friendly policies. It is these that you should consider most carefully before making your decision to use Livedrive as your storage solution.

Our Livedrive Video Review

Strengths & Weaknesses

Livedrive is unusual because it doesn’t offer all its services in one simple package with different price levels. Instead, it offers three different products at fixed prices, which you can purchase add-on services for. As this is the case, some of the strengths and weaknesses shown here may not apply to all of Livedrive’s products.

Features

85% – Very Good

Livedrive has all the necessary features for a modern cloud storage and backup service, but only the Pro Suite offers everything as a single integrated package.

You can customize the basic packages with add-ons, but this also means you’ll be paying extra. Even so, Livedrive has packed a lot into the software, making it one of the more impressive services in terms of the amount of control it offers users.

The interface is pleasant enough to look at, nice and compact, with simple access to the main features provided through a web-style menu bar with fairly intuitive menu buttons. If you’ve subscribed to a backup only or Pro Suite plan, you’ll see a “restore” button, but this is not shown if you only subscribed for the briefcase plan.

The dashboard is where most of the action takes place, although there’s really not very much for you to do here. You can switch between backup and briefcase modes, depending on what kind of subscription you have. If you try to access a feature you haven’t subscribed to, you’ll be informed that it’s not available and be prompted to upgrade.

There’s also a link to manage your account, and a handy usage meter showing how much space you’ve used for your storage. On the “settings” page, you can set which files and folders you want Livedrive to backup for you, and you can also setup encryption from the “security settings” button.

We’ll discuss this encryption feature in the section on privacy and security. There’s also an “advanced” button in the lower left corner hiding a mighty array of control features.

The controls let you:

Set the order your various file types are synced or backed up

Throttle the bandwidth Livedrive uses on your Internet connection

Enable and manage LAN transfers

Configure proxy settings

Check the system’s status (consistently failed this task during testing)

Setup storage exceptions for your briefcase

Perform an integrity check to make sure your files are healthy

This is more control than most other cloud storage services are currently offering, and that is one of the main reasons that could be used to justify opening an account with Livedrive.

Pricing

69% – Decent

Livedrive doesn’t offer any free storage, and there’s some complexity to the pricing plans because of the different features offered with each product. There are also some unusual conditions governing what you can do with each of these products.

Unlimited backup for this price sounds tempting, but there are a few things to be aware of concerning this. The first thing is just how unlimited that space really is, because the terms and conditions are very specific about the number of devices that can be backed up.

Perhaps unintentionally, this policy excludes backup from USB, CD or DVD. The wording of the policy is so unclear that it’s not possible to determine what Livedrive defines as a device. Every PC has limited internal storage capacity, and there’s a chance this policy might limit you to backup from a single hard drive.

Until Livedrive updates this policy information, it will continue to be a source of concern and we recommend consumers looking specifically for such features to read our Carbonite review or IDrive review.

Ease of Use

69% – Decent

Livedrive greatly improved the ease of use with the software compared to previous versions. All of the needed functions are integrated into a single interface and the overall usability has also been enhanced. If you’ve arrived here after reading older reviews, you need not worry about the usability. It’s easy to do everything, except cancel your subscription.

Canceling is not simple, with confusing information about how to unsubscribe. Some parts of the website indicate you can email a form to cancel, while other sections suggest the only way is to call the UK office number.

If calling Livedrive really is the only way to unsubscribe, it’s a problem. For one thing, it doesn’t take into account that some users may be hearing impaired or speech impaired. It also doesn’t acknowledge that users may not be fluent in English. Nor does it provide for the difficulties in scheduling the call from an international location or the potentially high costs involved.

Getting Started

It’s not just canceling that is tricky: the signup process is much more involved than with other providers. Once you’ve decided which level of service you’d like from the start screen, the way forward is to click on one of the “get free trial” buttons, and you’ll see a form open up on your screen:

This form is slightly misleading because it indicates that you only need to provide your email address and a password to create an account. In reality you will have to give up much more than this. It’s a common trick used by many online businesses to ensure they get at least your email address. Once you fill in the form and click the button to continue, you’ll see this more intimidating screen:

Note that the £144 option was chosen for me which I find a bit cheeky for a free trial. If you leave it as-is and forget to cancel your subscription before the free trial ends, you will be hit with the entire fee; there are no refunds.

With your account created and activated, you’ll be able to log in to your Livedrive web interface:

From there, scrolling down the screen, you will find a link to download the desktop client for Livedrive. Clicking on it will take you to the download area:

Unfortunately, downloading and installing the client software did not go smoothly. The test PC was booted up with a clean installation of Microsoft Windows 7, so the first thing the downloaded installer package did was to download and install the .net framework, which took several minutes.

That would have been fine, except that once the process was completed, the program just abruptly quit and had to be restarted to continue to the next process. At this point, the installer tried to download the Visual C++ runtime files, crashing multiple times and again just abruptly quitting with no error messages or feedback on the success or failure of the installation.

The logical solution to the problem was to download and install the required runtime library direct from Microsoft. This was so effortless, it made the frustration of attempting this with Livedrive’s installer seem all the more exasperating. After installing the runtime directly, it should have been a cakewalk from here.

Alas, even with runtime already installed, the program once again set off on a futile mission to download it. The nightmare finally ended when the network connection was dropped. Unable to connect to Microsoft’s server, the installer simply gave up trying, and moved on to the next phase of the installation. From here on, it was all very simple.

You’ll get a dialog asking for your login details:

If you click the “advanced options” button in the lower left corner, you get to choose where Livedrive will store your briefcase folder. When you’re ready to proceed, just click “next” and the application will be configured to work on your computer:

Provided everything went well, you will then see the client interface for Livedrive displayed on your screen:

Terms & Conditions

Finally, there are terrible clauses in the terms and conditions, such as clause 40, which states that Livedrive will remove backups from any computers that haven’t connected to the service at least once every 30 days. This clause was probably created to avoid wasting space on dead accounts, but really it shouldn’t matter how often you check in, as long as you’re paying the bills.

Another unusual clause is one that states your data may not be available right when you need it because Livedrive reserves the right to archive data in facilities where it may not be available for immediate access. These, and many other clauses, are disturbing, and should steer the privacy conscious well away from Livedrive and toward services like Sync.com and pCloud (make sure to read our Sync.com review and pCloud review for more info on these two services).

File Syncing & Sharing

70% – Decent

Syncing worked flawlessly, but slowly. One small issue is that you won’t see synced changes instantly on the web interface until the page is refreshed. The web interface shows the progress of uploads and downloads, but the desktop client doesn’t, which is a serious flaw.

Sharing is extremely easy. Your files can be accessed through a web page, and to share them with anyone, just send them the URL to your personal web space. The good thing about this is it makes sharing foolproof. On the negative side, there’s no selective sharing. Anyone with the URL has access to any of the files stored there.

Speed

60% – Fair

Livedrive wasn’t exceptionally speedy when uploading or downloading our 1GB test folder, averaging around two hours. It is worth mentioning that the upload speed was a little faster on Windows than on Linux for some reason.

First Attempt:

Second Attempt:

Average:

Upload Time (hours):

2:04

2:08

2:06

Download Time (hours):

2:21

2:10

2:16

The download speed was below what most users would be likely to find acceptable, and the interesting thing with this is that folders are downloaded as .zip archives. This makes downloading simple and convenient, but doesn’t allow asynchronous access to files because you have to wait for the whole package to arrive.

Security & Privacy Policy

40% – Terrible

Livedrive wants to promote itself as a very secure service, but really it depends on just who you want to secure your files from. If your only concern is outside intruders, Livedrive might just have you covered. But the AES-256 “military-grade encryption” doesn’t do anything to protect your files from Livedrive’s own employees, or anyone they grant themselves permission to share data with; Livedrive is not a zero-knowledge security service by any stretch.

In simple terms, encryption is only useful when you alone have access to the decryption key. There doesn’t seem to be any good reason why the keys need to be stored server-side. For example, SpiderOak, or any of our other best zero-knowledge cloud services, doesn’t require this (read our full SpiderOak review to get a full picture). It’s a concern because there are so many clauses in the privacy policy and the terms & conditions indicating that Livedrive’s staff will look through what you’re storing.

The first major red flag is found at clause 14 in the terms and conditions. The wording of this clause indicates that Livedrive will look at your files and will delete anything it has “a reasonable belief” that you don’t have the appropriate rights to the content. They also say they’ll do this without notifying you, and that means you don’t get the chance to present your side of the story.

In the privacy policy, Livedrive suggests they log metadata associated with your files. A much more concerning statement is found in the section on geo-location Information. Here they state that location data stored in your photos may be used by Livedrive to “optimize your experience.”

Livedrive indicates in the privacy policy that it will not only cooperate with law enforcement (think NSA) requests, but will pro-actively initiate contact with law enforcement agencies under certain conditions.

Customer Service

90% – Excellent

Livedrive provides rapid responses to support requests and appears to be making a sincere effort to provide quality advice. There’s also a reasonably comprehensive knowledge-base and FAQ list to browse through, when you need answers more quickly.

Staff are reachable by email, chat and phone, though the lines seem to only be manned during UK business hours.

The Verdict

Livedrive had mixed results in this test. It scored very well for features and usability, and also for customer service. File syncing and sharing were good due to their simplicity. File transfer speeds were not impressive enough.

The price was not too bad since the backup plan provides unlimited storage and the briefcase plan gives 2TB at a price that shouldn’t be painful to accept. The messy privacy policy and terms of use are the worrying thing, along with the fact that you have to provide credit card details up front, and it’s more difficult to cancel the service than it should be.

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Livedrive seems most suitable for customers that have a lot of large files to store, where security is not an important factor. In this situation, it’s a cheap bulk storage option. Apply your own independent encryption before uploading and those concerns about security will be less of a factor. Really what keeps this from being a perfect scenario is that ridiculous policy requiring you to check in every 30 days or risk losing your files.

We hope you found this review helpful in making your decision, make sure to check out any of our other cloud storage reviews. Thanks for reading, and feel free to share your own experiences using Livedrive by adding a comment below.

41 thoughts on “Livedrive”

so far i think livedrive is great service. it does everything it says on the website. for me the most important part is cloud backup thats why I chose the backup plan for $8 per month. I’m quite computer savvy, so I cannot confirm other people’s complaints with the software being too complicated.

I feel quite comfortable knowing that my files are backed up with livedrive.

I would never rely on one cloud backup only because if something happens to one service and i have all my files with them that could be devastating for my business. So I also use Backblaze as a secondary unlimited online backup (as it doesnt support file sync).

i’m a livedrive user for a year now and i can only second what the reviewer is saying. the service has improved a lot in the last couple months. Several times i was on the verge of leaving and signing up for another unlimited services, but there was just no one that could offer so much syncing space. i own three computers (laptop, and two desktops) I’m a 3d artist so i need a lot of space because of my renders that take up gigabytes and i cant afford to lose them.
livedrive handles large files well, but of course its easier to work with smaller files. if you dont have files larger than 2gb then livedrive is a good choice. syncing is not that fast as you might know it from dropbox but it only costs a fraction.

Hope you can advise. I have 3tb of data at the moment and was trying to free my laptop from being tethered to hard drives. In the past I had considered a large DAS and a NAS device but have now seen that you can get 5tb of online storage for $200 a year.

Key criteria.
1. Able to access my files anywhere.
2. If NAS device fails you can always use internet. or preferably turn it off when you are out of house. only use it to share files within house.
3. Need provider to be able to offer the option of import and export of data by sending physical drive for them to load and return. This prevents me being locked into service provider and avoid 3 months of upload/download of initial data.
4. Need to be able to have access to files like network drive and know they are also backed up and safe

Questions.
1. How is Livedrive different from Amazon S3
2. Does anybody else besides S3 offer the option of import and export of data by sending physical drive for them to load and return.
3. Cannot see how you access files and sync to S3.

In my household, we have 2 macs (my wife’s pro and my air) that we use
daily. I also have a Synology DS211+ set up with 2 3TB hard drives,
giving me a storage capacity of nearly 3TB. Currently, i have both
macs set up to use the NAS as their time machine destinations. I also
have a bunch of music and video files on the NAS that are only on the
NAS (not either laptop), as well as some old outlook PST files and old
files from computers we don’t use anymore. The total space being used
on the NAS right now is about 600GB.

I have about 1 GB of docs on Google Drive (synced to my mac) and then
another 9 GB of assorted docs on my mac hard drive. I’ve then got 52
GB of photos on my mac hard drive as well.

We also have many gigs of wedding photos and videos on DVDs that I am
about to transfer to our NAS.

So in the end (and after reading your review) I signed up with the Livedrive Pro Suite because it supports up to 5 computers. Unfortunately, I needed to pay extra for the NAS extension but in the end it was well worth it. Overall I feel that things are running quite smoothly with livedrive, only thing I can’t really comment on is the syncing because I have not used it yet.

I have a lot of data, in total around 5 TB, so the only cloud storage solution that I was taking into consideration was one that would give me unlimited cloud storage and backup. I had a look at Crashplan (really cheap but no sync), then I had a look at Backblaze (really cheap, too, but lacks features), the other brands like JustCloud I’ve never heard of so I did stay away.

I remember reading about Livedrive in some article of a tech magazine. So I thought what the hell, let’s try it. I was looking for further reviews on the web an found this one. What’s interested me the most was speed because I have so much data, I really want to bring it to the cloud as fast as possible. My files are still being transferred roughly at the reported speed in this review – so I’m quite happy with that. Honestly, I can’t say anything about the support but I marked it with five stars anyway, hopefully this won’t bias this review toooooo much 😉 Anywho…looking forward to making a test restore with some files soon and taking some over to the Briefcase to sync.

Hi! My name is Herbert. I have tried many online backup services in the past. First, I signed up with Mozy, but after a while they canceled their unlimited online backup offering (that was back in 2007). Then, I signed up with Carbonite online backup because back then they were the only ones that could offer unlimited online backup and they were pretty cheap. I think it was only around 60 bucks per year or something. So I signed up but unfortunately I didn’t read the fine print. They throttled my bandwidth after a couple of gigabytes making uploads terribly slow. So I needed to change again and look for different provider. That was probably in 2011.

That was also the time when my professional career took off and I needed to travel a lot. So, I bought a laptop and I still had my PC at home. So a different need arose: I had to sync my files across those devices. I tracked down several possibilities: one thing could be using a combination of services like dropbox or sugar sync with an online backup service. But then I would have to think about where I stored what kind of data so I was looking for a solution which could provide me with the best of both worlds. That’s why I signed up for life drive a couple of months ago and I don’t want to go back. Yes, there are some glitches when it comes to file sync as reviewers have pointed out before but I didn’t expect a “perfect service” either. It was just right for my needs offering unlimited online backup plus a vast file syncing cloud storage space.

I think livedrive is going to be useful for people who travel a lot, but also need their files for when they are at home. You can carry your backups around and still have your files synced across all devices and even access them while you are at the airport for example. I can’t tell you how much I used the file preview feature on my iPhone to look at an Excel spreadsheet or a PowerPoint presentation before meeting with a client.

If you sign up for livedrive you should really take advantage of the savings for signing up for a year or two years, because I think if you go monthly they are too expensive and there are better and cheaper alternatives (Backblaze, Crashplan but without sync unfortunately). After all who wants to pay 25 bucks monthly for unlimited storage and file civilization if you can get for 60% off when you sign up for two years??

So, yes, I can recommend livedirve if you are willing to accept that it is not perfect.

I would describe myself as not very computer savvy, but I was looking for a solution to backup my computer files. I’m a secretary so I handle a lot of documents, Excel spreadsheets, Word documents etc. Fortunately, my boss let’s me work from home (sometimes) because I have to watch my grandkids. So I need access to my work related files (I do not get a company laptop or phone). I stumbled across dropbox but i heard people saying it is not for backup (as it is only storage), so I started looking for a solution that would allow me to access my backed up files from the office AND from home.

I can’t remember how I found Livedrive but I decided to go for the Pro Suite (which is quite expensive if you pay monthly but I signed up for 2 years and I found a coupon somewhere). Sometimes livedrive wouldn’t sync my files properly which was quite annoying. For example I edited a Word document and it would take ages until the updated version was shown. Weirdly enough, this only happens with Word files if I edit Excel Spreadsheets everything syncs almost automatically. So make sure your files are being synced correctly.

As I said I’m not very computer savvy (born in 1956) so it takes me a while to figure out things on the computer and I was quite overwhelmed with Livedrive’s software for Windows that’s why ease of use gets only 3 stars.

For now my hard drives run smoothly but you never now and I feel a lot better knowing that I can always get my files when I need them.

Here’s what you need to know about livedrive: IT SAVED MY ASS!! Just like that. I woke up my computer wasn’t working anymore, I could turn it on but nothing would happen. I brought it to an expert he said he couldn’t do anything-so I remembered that I acutally signed up with livedrive (I totally had forgotten about that).

So in the end I could:

+ restore all my files because I had set it up to backup everything
+ even find files I didn’t know I still had like some papers I wrote in university
+ get all my files back quickly because it was FAST

====

I can’t tell you much about their support. I heard some bad things on the forums but for me livedrive saved my butt. +++++THANKS++++!!!

About me: not a tech person, 30 years old, not that much files.
what was important to me: security and ease of usewhere livedrive meet my requirements: it is very easy to use (apart from the that that you need to download an extra piece of software to get to your files), and they have some sort of encryption that is supposed to be fairly secure (but I’m no expert a this).where livedrive didn’t meet my expectation: it slows my computer down quite a bit (it’s not one of the latest models but it’s not old either), sometimes I feel it is taking a long while before “detecting” a change of a file to back that up. That scares me a bit because what happens if my computer crashes in exactly that moment, that’s why I keep pressing “scan now” if I have an important file to backup.

First off I’d like to give 3,5 stars for livedrive but your review system doesn’t make that possible so I gave it 4 stars. In general I can second those positive review I’ve read so far and I’ve been using Livedrive for a couple of weeks. In fact, I just ran out of trial mode and decided to go with the Backup package. I signed up for with the free trial for the pro suite but realized I didn’t need that much syncing space – it’s just an overkill. So for now I’m using sugarsync for my file sync needs.

Why 3,5 stars? Well, first I don’t like the plan options, they made my decision very hard finding exactly what I need.. Why is there a backup and a briefcase plan? Why not combine the backup with a little bit of Briefcase, like 100GB? That would be perfect for me as I don’t need a massive 2TB or 5TB syncing space. So I grudgingly chose the backup plan because it offers unlimited backup (I have around 350GB of files to protect, so metered backup systems are not an option for me).

Before deciding a plan I contacted support to ask if it’s possible to get a little bit of sync with the backup plan but guess what: they didn’t know and promised to get back to me, until today I’m waiting for an answer!! They only get 3 Stars in Support because they answered very fast and were quite polite, though that doesn’t help me a lot. I can’t comment on how they help you if you have technical problems, though.

I’m happy with livedrive – for now. But I’m also considering other options. I think now that there is so much competition in the cloud storage space there might be other options soon that have a plan that better suits my needs.

My experience with livedrive has been more/less ok. Contrary to other reviewers, I don’t find the software easy to use. I’m wondering what I’m missing – but how to I recover previous files version from within the software client? No idea. How can I prioritize files that I want to backup? Burried in the preference pane. So ease of use only gets three stars here.
Performance is ok, BUT it slowed down my computer and bandwidth quite a bit. How can I limit bandwith? It should be possible but I just couldnt find it in the software. The software itself makes a good impression it runs ok but nothing fancy either. I swtiched from SugarSync because it was too expensive for me to backup my 200+GB of files.
Didn’t need support until now but I’ve read here and there that it is not the best but they at least provide a telephone number which i like in case something is broken I feel like I can contact them and speak to a person (hopefully).
If you’re tech averse I cannot recommend livedrive, but if you’re used to seeing backup services run or have installed and tried out the one or the other you might like it actually. I’m not quite sure if livedrive is forever, or if I move soon to a different provider, only time will show.

LiveDrive leaves a LOT to be desired. Ask yourself if you feel safe with a company that doesn’t even use SSL connections for their web interface by default? Features added to the service in the last few years have been minimal at best and many don’t work as expected. Performance is absolutely horrible, just try using WebDAV or SSL-FTP.

In my case I moved country but when I tried to get my billing changed (their prices are cheaper in Europe) they couldn’t do it, and every message I sent to their support took literally days (sometimes even weeks) to get a reply.

There are many reports of data corruption from their users. I’ve had a few files mysteriously become unreadable or truncate to 0 bytes. That’s totally unacceptable.

LiveDrive’s web interface hasn’t been improved for nearly 3 years now. Neither has their support site. Why do you have to set up a separate account to post tickets or messages on their forum?

These are all examples of how they aren’t interested in progressing, being happy just to drift along and collect their fees instead of trying to improve their service.

In short, from a superficial point of view it seems like they offer a decent service but the more you dig into them the more you will discover that this company is run by people with an absolute minimal understanding of the technology and business they require.

Livedrive on the face of it seems to offer the best service, but I tried it out for a few months and had nothing but problems. It just doesn’t work. The program constantly crashes, and you can’t trust it. For example, in my case when I lost a file and went to recover it from Livedrive, it wasn’t there and I noticed that some other files of that type (not a system file, ie a file Livedrive should be backing up) weren’t being backed up.

I went through several back and forths with tech support (who were friendly and quick to respond) and eventually the issue was flagged for the development team. Three months later the problem was still there so I quit the service. There’s no point in a back up service you can’t rely on.

It seems for large hard drives the best way is still just to keep a local duplicate. I think this kind of service is still years off from being able to back up large amounts of data well. For smaller amounts of data backup dropbox works flawlessly and is brilliant.

I was with Livedrive for years, so long in fact I am almost 6TB of backups. I have it backing up my servers and laptops. I don’t think I ever really needed to speak to them about anything.

However about a month or so ago one of my servers started backing up a tremendous amount of data in fairness it took me about a month to figure out why my throughput stats were so high. Anyway after a fair bit of digging The Livedrive client had been backing up continually changing log files. Admittedly this could have my configuration mistake as I am pretty sure they would have change this on an update. Thinking nothing off it I fixed the problem and all was fine.

About 2 to 3 weeks later I got a “Breach of the Live drive® Terms of Use” email and that my account closed, no help, no discussion, no attempt to resolve any issues or a desire to resolve any issues. The only thing I could get out of support is you’ve breached section 20 part b and f. Your account will be closed.

I am writing this review not just because I am annoyed at livedrive, I’ve been a loyal customer for 4 or 5 years, but I had no idea such an issue would get me kicked off the service and anyone else should double check their configuration just in case.

I made the same experiance as Ken. I am a customer of Livedrive now for several years. All of the sudden I get the mail, that my contract is cancelled due to breach of section 20 part A and F.
All attempts to get in touch with somebody have failed. No explanation, no discusson or chance to fix whatever I might have done wrong.
This behavior may be owed to the fact, that their pricing has changed since I signed up. I have several TB backed up and still pay the price they locked me in a few years back. I just think they want to get rid of all customers using a lot of their storage and not paying the new pricing.
By the way this is not the only problem I had with them. A while back, I had to restore several files and they “lost” several of them. Never was able to recover the files. Their custome support is really below average. I am actually not terrible unhappy if they cancel my membership… If I do get my refund. They cancelled my membership TWO day after I paid for a full year in advance. I guess time will tell.

Hi had livedrive for approx 4 years, and things were fine to begin with, files were backing up, I had lots of computers connected, and I was happy with my £10 a month. Then things started to go bad, after a year or two; I would try to access a file online, but it wouldn’t work, the software would give up uploading files until I updated the software, which required a computer reboot (which I rarely do) (and these updates were coming in quite often, sometimes days apart). Then failure hit, I had one of my laptops backed up, everything seemed fine, the software status was all ok, all files sync’d, etc, then the laptop melted, so I binned it, got a new one, downloaded the restore software, navigated to that backup, and started the download process, to my horror, massive chunks of data wouldn’t download, and it would error ‘file not sync’d yet’, so the software knew the files existed on the laptop as they were being indexed, but they claim the files never got sync’d, despite being running on that laptop for at least two years, how is this possible? So I figured, more fool me, trusting this company, but carried on paying hoping things would be ok, but then approx 6 months later, I get an email from them saying my account was being deleted as they found copyrighted material on my backups (my LEGALLY acquired music library), despite asking them why this was a problem, I was told that no copyrighted material was allowed to be uploaded, and their decision was final, and I had 30 days to get any files off their servers before they were deleted!

Horrible company, I spent hundreds of pounds on their service, and the very few times i needed it, it didn’t work! Shame on them!

I’m not a techie but I’m not inexperienced either. I signed up for the backup system and have had nothing but trouble from the beginning — starting with logging in. And my account page looks nothing like the screenshots I’ve seen so far.

The design is terrible. There is no user’s manual or even a set of instructions. The first (and last) backup was performed almost two months ago and there is no self-evident way to update it. There is no obvious way to recover the data in case of a crash.

The answers from LiveDrive werent helpful and I finally decided to cancel the service and see if a refund was possible. At that point, the replies stopped completely.

Generally, the reviewers overlook one rather important aspect; LiveDrive’s products simply do not work.

My company has used Live Drive for cloud storage and backups for five years and it has always been tolerably flaky, but Version 3 on Windows 10 simply does not function.

At any one time 75% of the machines insist that LD run an integrity check at reboot, the integrity check never finds anything to correct but it still insists on running. At the same time user files are not being uploaded or download to the client machines. God only knows what the backup function is doing, or not doing, whichever may be the case.

And customer service is another adventure in futility. To get support one needs to go to their website and open a support ticket. The response to the problem is always the same, “Reinstall the desktop client.” This doesn’t appear to do anything; I guess it is intended to make you feel better.

After reporting the desktop reinstall’s lack of results, they will send you a link to download and run their LogRetriever and send them the results. Seventy-two hours after that you will receive a system generated response stating that you have not responded to their last message and the ticket is being closed.

At this point your only option is to completely uninstall LiveDrive and delete the cache files. You can then reinstall and download the cache. The download takes just over six days for a 256 GB cache, apparently their serves are connected by dialup on a 300 baud line.

Initially (6 years ago), LiveDrive was a great option however moving into the present, others have caught up and overtaken them and Livedrive is now a dying legacy product.

Their customer support is horrific and their servers are slow. They also take your money without any warning (when re-billing), and refuse to offer any pro-rata’d refunds simply telling you you’re screwed and you just have to use the year out even if you don’t want the service.

If you then try to cancel the renew service, you will be told the only option is to cancel the entire account and everything will be erased.

I can’t get the livedrive to keep working on my laptop…I’ve never done a complete backup yet and I can’t get thru to a live body on Livedrive. I’m seriously thinking of calling foul and getting the BBB involved. any tips for me?

WARNING AVIOD AVIOD AVIOD ….JUST READ SOME OF THESE REVIEWS. I bought the service through a reseller but my data is still held with livedrive. My account was charged for another year and then they suspended my account for no reason. No warning just suspended. I have spent the past month trying to get a response from anyone and nothing. Live drive then contact me and said nothing to do with us it dripbit. When I said its livedrive who has my data they just said contact your reseller. I have told them so many times that dripbit refuse to answer anything they just keep saying nothing to do with us. They now hold my data illegally and there seems little I can do now but tale legal action to try and get it back. The service is bad as is the customer service. the app is so basic its pointless. AVOID for your own sake and the chance of loosing all your data and money.

I bought a lifetime account some years ago, via Dripbit. Suddenly my account was suspended and then it was closed. All attempts to contact Livedrive were met with – contact Dripbit. All attempts to contact Dribit we met with – all support must use the ticketing system. All support tickets are ignored, emails are ignored, live chat options, yes you’ve guessed it all ignored.

Referring all this back to Livedrive and theysay, yes you’ve guessed it again – You must contact Dripbit!

You couldn’t make it up. The worst quailtiy of service in the world. AVOID bothe LIVEDRIVE and DRIPBIT!

I had the same situation. I bought a “lifetime” account. The service has always been mediocre, but adequate for my needs. Now they’re holding my files ransom unless I pay MORE money for a service I already bought. Biggest scam ever. I’m also getting the run around with “customer service”.
This company is the epitome of “Buyer Beware”!

I bought a lifetime account last year via Dripbit as well. When I ran into an issue, Livedrive would not assist at all and told me to contact Dripbit. I never received any replies from Dripbit for any of the tickets I created regarding my issue.

Now it appears Dripbit is no longer a reseller, and my “lifetime” account has been changed to a trial account by Livedrive and they will not honor my “lifetime” purchase.

This is a hit-and-run scam in my opinion. Instead of taking Dripbit to task, they instead convert the users accounts into trial accounts and then tell you to pay monthly if you wish to keep the account active. My advice – avoid any resellers in the future for any type of online services. I can buy 5TB drives (I have two!) for around $120 for backups instead of spending money for online backup, and I’m sure I can restore/backup far quicker in this manner.

My rating for Dripbit – 0%. Never responded to any inquiries or tickets created.

My rating for Livedrive – 2%. At least they did respond, if only to tell me to contact the reseller for assistance and nothing else.

Livedrive was a waste of time and money for me. I dutifully uploaded my files but on the few occasions I needed to restore a file from Livedrive it wasn’t there. It seemed that the oldest files, the ones that would have been backed up first, the ones that Livedrive software reported were indeed backed, weren’t there. Livedrive customer service was evasive. They invariably advised I run diagnostics etc but had nothing to say about why my supposedly backed up files weren’t there. I My guess is that for people like me who got the low-price plan at $8 per month, we got what we paid for….nothing. It’s a scam.

Signed up for a lifetime subscription via DripBit. What can you say about a service that took six months to back up my files online, consistently used up 30% of my memory, and then, when things went sour with DripBit, arbitrarily cancelled my subscription, no refund or recourse? Avoid LiveDrive like the plague.

I have been a livedrive user, and now reseller almost since they started.
I dont understand why everyone is slating there services and products. I am always reading awful reviews. Ive never wanted to post my comments up til now.
Reading over some of the other comments…
Ive never had an issue with restoring items, and use the briefcase feature daily, and again have been for years. Occasionally i get a sync issue between machines, which can be annoying, but is easily resolved by doing a check and repair.
The software gets better and better too.
The support service was almost non existent a couple of years back, but now i get a reply next day as and when i fire them a question. I know it could be better with 24 hours support.
I help my clients with there backups and restoring files and they are happy. Especially when they have overwritten a file, and want to go back to a previous revision i have saved my clients bacon on quiet a few occasions.
Pricing i think is very reasonable too. 4/5 for me. only thing i would like to see changed, is maybe 24/7 support and live chat.

I have been a livedrive user, and now reseller almost since they started…. me too! AND I HAVE A LIFETIME MEMBERSHIP!!! Probably you could do me a big favor and ask support why my account vanished almost a month ago – dgtalproducts@gmail.com. Since there’s no account, there’s no way to login or retrieve pass (which I haven’t forgotten BTW). No way to contact support…

I have been using the LD Briefcase for about 3 years, and have generally been very satisfied. My gripe is that yesterday my auto-renew was rejected because i had not updated my credit card information. I got an email about this and found that I was instantly locked out of my files. There’s no question that the problem was my fault, but I would expect at least a day’s warning to fix the problem before this punishment was meted out. Given the global usage of the system, and LD’s operations on UK time, my business could easily be down for an entire working day. And then the only thing you can do is submit a “ticket” and you have no idea when someone will respond. Knowing that there will always be somebody in the sales dept. (even if no one’s available in the support dept. ) I got through the sales desk and got it straightened out in short order. But really, I think that this kind of treatment is small-minded and unprofessional

I used livedrive for several years, but last year my creditcard expired and my account was automatically closed. Just like that, no notifications, not even an email. The wordt part of it is I could not contact support, because you need a valid account for that.
After getting a new creditcard I expected my account to be reinstated as has happended for my other services that bumped into this problem. But to no avail.
Finally I contacted them using their sales email address and they reported that everything was gone. My briefcase files, my backups, everything is lost.
Peculiar that a firm you entrust with your backups, deletes them.

I used Livedrive for about three years and was fairly happy with them apart from their awful Windows software – you literally had to select every single directory you wanted to backup and there was no way you could select a whole drive or multiple directories at once. The process was laborious with each directory taking a minute to select – after every directory selection you were taken back to the top level directory forcing you to navigate through the whole directory structure each time to get to the next folder. Imagine doing this for hundreds of directories. Each time I upgraded my PC or hard drives I would literally have to put aside a whole weekend to simply select the directories I wanted to backup. The original software let you select multiple directories at once, then they ‘upgraded’ to a new version that didn’t. Shortly after this happened a couple of years back I warned them that this was a deal breaker for me, they said that they would pass on my concerns. Nothing changed but I persevered with them until this year when Amazon Drive unlimited came down to an excellent price and their software was user friendly so I switched. I let Livedrive know that I was cancelling and give them my reasons for doing so. Their astonishing reaction? They IMMEDIATELY deactivated my account before my current month’s subscription was up and I couldn’t access any of my backups! When I tried to log in I simply got a ‘Your Email or Password is incorrect. Please try again’. I received no courtesy email saying we’re sorry to see you go etc. Just this f*** you reaction! Because my account no longer exists and I can no longer access my backed up files I can only assume they were immediately deleted even though I was still within my subscription period. Consequently I would NOT recommend Livedrive as they are not customer focused and should NOT be trusted with your precious data.

I used the livedrive service for a few years. In retrospect I don;t know why I stayed with it for so long. Livedrive corrupted about 1 – 3 percent of all my files. None of them could ever be recovered, except the ones I backed up locally. If you are reckless enough to use their service, back up on a local hard drive all your data.

Hi,
I purchase the lifetime license of 2 Tb. Worked for 2 months and was terrible slow, so I not used it for long time. And now I can not to connect to my account – when connecting i take the respond ‘there is no such account’.

I have signed for NAS backup and got charged two fees – $88.90 and 84.00 in same month. After that I started my upload process to their cloud. I have 1Gbs FIOS connection and my upload was from dial-up days hoovering between 1.1Mbs and 1.3Mbs… After few weeks of struggling and countless emails to them I decided its time to cancel my NAS subscription and I asked for a refund… At that time rep named Gourdev from Livedrive told me that I have signed for full year and I will not be able to get refund since its more than 14 days from the date I signed. I was trying to explain to Gourdev from Livedrive that after few weeks of trying to get that backup upload work – it still not working and that is the reason I want to cancel… I explained that upload speed would hoover between 1.1Mbs and 1.3 Mbs and upload process crashes every few days. Simply this is not a solution for me where I have several TB of data that needs to be uploaded and with such slow upload speed + crashes it would take me another few months to complete.
They refused to issue any refund claiming that in contract states that I will be charged two fees ($88.90 and 84.00) after 14 days of free trial. The thing is that we tried that thing to get it to work in these first 14 days but we couldn’t and they still believe they should get paid for service they never delivered. Shame on you Livedrive.

I am currently with IDrive where my NAS backup works fine and I can cancel at any time I want.

What good is a backup service that deletes its copy of a file that is not found on a client’s pc any longer? Doesn’t that kinda mean a lot for a friggin’ backup service? If you lose a hard drive, or just delete one simple file from YOUR computer, the next time the backup scan runs, it deletes the copy of the missing file (or entire disk) up on the cloud. Seems extremely useless.